1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to electronic mail (e-mail) programs, and more particularly to an e-mail program having program code for monitoring an e-mail to an intended recipient who is an end-user, and selecting, in an automated fashion, a backup contact entity to contact if the end-user is unavailable to respond to the e-mail.
2. Description of the Related Art
Oftentimes, for various reasons, an end-user of an e-mail computer system is unavailable to respond to e-mails. For example, the end-user may be on vacation or on a leave of absence. It is known for e-mail computer systems to have functionality that allows end-users to set their status to out-of-office in order to communicate, to other end-users within the e-mail computer system, when available to respond to e-mails.
Current technical solutions for managing an e-mail of an end-user unavailable to respond to an e-mail, may require a sender of the e-mail to manually identify a backup person (e.g., a manager or team member of the end-user) to contact only subsequent to the sender receiving an electronic out-of-office notification in response to the e-mail. Specifically, the sender of the e-mail can identify the backup person to contact by searching the electronic out-of-office notification for information indicating the backup person to contact, or even searching an electronic repository for storing contact information of various people and their relationships with each other. For example, the sender can search the electronic repository for the end-user's manager or team member. However, current technical solutions are limited because these may not provide program code functionality for managing the e-mail of the end-user in order to select, in an automated fashion, a backup person to contact.